in this video i show you how to add text to your videos in shortcut
hi everyone my name is Joe and welcome to Ubitronics on this channel i show you how
to use open source software today we're going to look at adding text to videos
in Shotcut there are two main ways to add text to videos in Shotcut the first is to apply
the text to the video clip itself and that's done by cutting the video in the correct place
and then applying the text filter to the video clip that's been cut
this limits the text to only that section of the video if i demonstrate that now no text
and then the text comes up and then where it cuts it will disappear again
the second method is to apply the text to its own channel in your video timeline to do this
you create the new channel and then add a transparent layer and then add your text
to that layer the end result is very similar to the first but this allows you to add your
text over multiple tracks or over multiple video cuts so both methods are very valid and you're
probably going to need to use a mixture of the two during your Shotcut editing so the
first thing i'm going to do for method one which is applying the text to a video clip
is drag in the first video clip and then scroll to the place where you want your text to begin
cut the video with this button here or s on the keyboard and then where you want the text to end
do the same again so now you can select the part of the video that you want your text
to display on select that part and then come up to filters click the plus
under the video tab select or search for text
under text you have two options you want the text simple option and then on your video
timeline if you click into so your playhead is over that section you will see that you've
got your text to display on the screen running through these options very quickly the presets
are something that you should always select first if you select it after doing something
down here then it's going to overwrite anything you've done so what you want to do is you select
your preset first this can be particularly helpful if you want something like a lower third
selection but generally speaking you're probably going to manually do this yourself so the next
box is about the text that you're actually going to show on the screen it's got some handy insert
fields just down here that you can use for certain things you're welcome to use them if you need to
but in most cases i think you're probably going to over type this and type in your own things
so for this example i'm going to put in this is a bike and i'll use an explanation mark and that's
going to be my text that i i want on the screen coming down you've got your font color your font
type and if you click into that then you can change it to pretty much anything you want
you've got this option here now if you don't have this selected
your boundary box is going to automatically resize your font as you move it around the screen however
if you have this selected it's going to make it look very different and the reason for that
is that we've got size 48 selected here so it's going to use the size option in this box here
so if you don't want to use a set size and you want it to resize your boundary box i suggest
unticking this and using your boundary box as the sizing mechanism in shortcut the outline of your
text always has a color as well so you can add or decrease the size of that with the thickness here
and the color here and just for reference if you click onto any of these you can use a color
picking tool just to select the color that you want the gradient that you want there and also
you've got your alpha channel here 255 is full color and then 0 is transparent so depending on
what you want and which one you're on um you may want different things to happen there so you could
theoretically have your font as being completely transparent just with an outline and then that
would that would make a pretty weird effect but that might be what you're after as you move down
your size and position if you want to be exact on measurements on the screen then you can do that me
personally i use these boundary boxes so by using the boundary box and resizing it to exactly where
you want then that gives you exactly the same effect as trying to play with all of these numbers
now if you want to completely move your text so you want it right at the very top of the screen
you could be using these having it aligned to the left or right this as this is completely full size
it's not going to show you much but the obviously the top and middle and bottom vertical fits do
you've also got the option of moving the boundary box to exactly where you want it
so by clicking on this circle in the center you can change it to exactly where you want it to be
okay so i'm just going to click down here on the video track 1 which is going to deselect
everything and that gets rid of the boundary box option then i'm just going to click
play on the video just to show you that it pops up here and then it will disappear again here
okay so if you wanted to add text to your video and you've not got any kind of editing going on
throughout this then that's probably the easiest way and the quickest way for you to add text
to your videos now option two is when you have standalone text that isn't connected to your video
in any way so first of all if we add in a second video track and then just start playing that you
can see it's got no text on it and it's just going to play a little bit of chess on the screen there
what we want is a an overlay to have text over the top but what we don't want to do is have
it connected to the video itself first thing we need to do click on to open other click onto text
and then you can type your text in here or just leave it blank and click ok when this screen pops
up just close it down and go to your playlist section drag your screen over to the playlist
and then let go here it will say transparent and basically what we've done there is created a
text filter with a transparent background so now if we want to apply the same text again and again
and again to a video then we can double click on here get it selected in red we can make our edits
in the filters section so it says this is chess and then when you drag that onto the timeline
it will always have exactly the right settings that you've put into your filter here now
if you wanted to change that for any reason on your timeline
you can change it here and let's change that to six and let's put an exclamation mark on the end
and let's not use the font so this is much bigger this is kind of similar to this
but the template file if we go back to the template file it's still going to be small
and unaffected so you can always use a template file up here and reuse the same text
or you can edit it on the flyer down here a little bit more versatile than this
option than the first option okay so with this transparent layer added into our timeline we can
extend that to the full video if we wanted to or we can have it display
the point where we want it to stop so it can have a very similar effect to this
where it starts playing and then it pops up and then as soon as it finishes it disappears again
exactly the same result as that so why would we want to do this method well let's imagine
that for whatever reason we wanted the text to display half over this one and half over that one
then we can do that with a transparent layer
you couldn't do that with method one so therefore you'd need to use method two
this also allows us to do transitions between the two without it affecting the text
so now they'll filter into each other but the text has not changed so as you go through your editing
journey i expect you'll need both of these options at different times the key is to understanding
when to use each one and i would advise when possible to use option one and when not possible
to use option two option two takes a little bit longer but it is a little bit more versatile i
hope that's been helpful please consider liking and subscribing and i'll see you in the next video